Want to hear an unpopular opinion in the developer world that might garner a similar reaction to saying pineapple belongs on pizza? Try saying, “I hate hackathons” in a room full of programmers.
Hackathons are a key part of a developer’s career journey. But while the social events are commonly thought to boost company culture and foster collaboration, some programmers think the popular events have room for improvement.
Bad blood. IT Brew caught up with several hackathon alums to discuss their feelings toward the coding events. Mira Welner, a bioinformatics engineer, told IT Brew that at one point in her life, all of the socks in her closet were swag received during her participation in hackathon events. However, despite her active history with the social coding events, her feelings toward them were less than stellar, partly because she believes they “glorified bad coding standards.”
“It’s not possible to do something better in 24 hours than what you could do giving a week’s worth of work to it,” Welner said.
Welner also added that at times, hackathons feel like a way for some companies to squeeze out “extra work” from employees under the guise of a fun company event. She recalled one time where a hackathon at a former employer required a team to convert a script from Java to Pearl as a project.
“It’s just a fun way of packaging, ‘Hey, now you have to…pull an all-nighter before a deadline,’” Welner said.
Simbian CPO Sumedh Barde, who has participated in his fair share of hackathons over the years, told IT Brew that he has his own issues with the codefests. He told IT Brew that the events can sometimes lead to a crash in morale after they conclude because only a small pool of participants can win, and those who do aren’t guaranteed that their projects will manifest into something larger.
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“The participants felt many times like they put in a lot of hours and it went nowhere,” Barde said.
Dave Taubler, a seasoned software architect who estimates that he has participated in no more than five hackathons in his lifetime, added that the short, intensive timeframe associated with the programming events isn’t exactly a strong draw for some.
“To be invited to stay up all night and not get any sleep, and conversely not be with my family, that sort of a thing, it’s not appealing,” Taubler said.
Hacking the hackathon. Despite their gripes with hackathons, those who spoke with IT Brew said that they don’t find the social events completely obsolete. Welner said that hackathons may prove themselves to be useful for those who are early in their career and are looking for networking opportunities. She added that the events are most practical when they have a specific purpose, such as when companies grant participants temporary access to their API to see if someone can hack into their server.
Meanwhile, Taubler said that hackathons should be more fused with a developer’s day-to-day worklife to be more appealing.
“I would have them be better integrated with what we engineers at whatever company it is do on a on a regular basis,” Taubler said. “It’s not just this anomaly that for a week you work on something totally random and then you’re done.”